Thursday, December 29, 2011

Fangness

"""A GPS collar plots the journey of the lone gray wolf — loping over mountains, through forests and across highways.

The young male left his pack in northeastern Oregon in early September, setting out to find a mate and territory of his own. By the end of November, he had meandered 761 miles. Lately he has been lingering a day or two's trot from California.

If OR7, as he is known, crosses the border, he will be the first wild wolf recorded in the Golden State since 1924.

Even if he doesn't, the trek has made it evident that the return of the mythic native predator is imminent."""

"We're not planning to reintroduce wolves," said Mark Stopher, an ecologist with the California Department of Fish and Game. "They're going to show up on their own."

That prospect is thrilling to conservationists but chilling to ranchers, who have lost livestock in other parts of the West.

"It's going to be very high-profile, controversial," Stopher said.

Gray wolves were all but eradicated in the lower 48 states by the 1930s. Protected under the federal Endangered Species Act, they started to move back into northern Montana from Canada half a century later. Then in the mid-1990s, 66 Canadian wolves were released in Yellowstone National Park and central Idaho.

As of last year, the Northern Rocky Mountain population had grown to an estimated 1,651 wolves. But that number is dropping in the wake of hunts OKd in Montana and Idaho after Congress delisted much of the population earlier this year."""

"White Fang knew the law well: to oppress the weak and obey the strong." - Jack London, White Fang